IMGlance.com: Think Of It Like A Techmeme For Internet Marketing News

If you’ve been in the internet marketing space for some time, you’ve surely come across a few news curation websites. And I’m going to introduce you to the newest one in just a moment.

Our own such site, Sphinn, thrived (and survived) for four years with a combination of news curation and forum discussion. (Today, we do news curation via our Marketing Day and SearchCap newsletters.) Inbound.org has been going for a little more than two years now. Threadwatch re-launched in early 2013 after being closed for about five years. Others have come and gone, as well.

It’s the work of Matthias Klappenbach, a Seattle-based programmer and eBay product manager who had already built an aggregator for German law blogs. He says he developed IMGlance because of personal need.

“Earlier this year I took over eBay’s paid initiatives in social,” he told me via email, “in addition to my work as their affiliate product lead and I suddenly found myself reading tons of blogs about social in addition to affiliate and SEO blogs. Having just finished work on a platform aggregating content, it seemed a no-brainer to launch a site for Internet Marketing content.”

IMGlance is taking a different approach than the marketing news curation sites that have come before it: There’s no voting and no discussion. In that sense, it’s closer to a site like Techmeme than anything else.

Klappenbach says the home page is still “a work in progress.” (It’s changed a couple times during the past 4-5 days that I’ve been using the site.) There are separate tabs for trending stories and blog/website rankings — a feature that uses a scoring system, which Klappenbach says will get better when the site has more readers. And he doesn’t mind sharing how the ranking works: “The ranking is currently based on only two factors: the number of posts per month and the number of readers per post. Both factors count 50 percent and the amount of possible points per factor equals the number of total blogs in the ranking.”

There are almost 300 blogs and websites in IMGlance’s database, and their content is pulled in via RSS — i.e., there are no “submit a link” tools. It’s fully automated.

Klappenbach says he’d like to build out features around individual authors in the future, since so many people write for multiple sites. But for now, he hopes visitors recognize that the site they see now is just “a start” and “still pretty simple,” with many changes to come.

About The Author

Matt McGee joined Third Door Media as a writer/reporter/editor in September 2008. He served as Editor-In-Chief from January 2013 until his departure in July 2017. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee.